S211. But Is It Any Good? Appropriation and Evaluation

Room 608, Washington State Convention Center, Level 6
Saturday, March 1, 2014
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm

 

Contemporary poets frequently “borrow” other people’s words. They employ appropriation, collage, sampling, and outright plagiarism. What do we make, though, of all this copying, cutting, and pasting? Is lifting text from a Web page or retyping a novel over Twitter in any way comparable to sitting down and trying to put "the best words in the best order" (Coleridge)? And when writers “steal” instead of “write,” how can we tell a good poem from a bad one? What criteria should we use?


Participants

Moderator:

Jessica Burstein teaches literature at the University of Washington.

Brian M. Reed is a professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. In addition to writing more than twenty articles about modern poetry, he has published three books, most recently Nobody's Business: 21st-Century Avant-Garde Poetics and co-edited two essay collections.

Marjorie Perloff is professor emerita of English, Stanford University and Florence R. Scott Professor of English Emerita, University of Southern California. Author of fifteen books, she is the editor of others on the general subject of 20th-Century Poetry and Poetics.

Danny Snelson is a writer, editor, and archivist working on a dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. His online editorial work can be found in Eclipse, PennSound, UbuWeb, and through the Reissues project on Jacket2.

Craig Dworkin is the author of five books of poetry, numerous chapbooks, and two book-length critical studies. He has also edited five collections. Currently teaching literature at the University of Utah, he serves as senior editor to the online digital archive Eclipse.

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